YESTERDAY was the deadline for Nicosia residents and businesses to clean up their acts ahead of a promised Municipality crackdown on illegalities and eyesores in the capital.
The city’s mayor, Michalakis Zampelas, announced the initiative amid much fanfare in July, listing a whole series of violations published in a special booklet. These range from littering to unlicensed street vending, from impeding traffic to cluttering pavements with illegal constructions and hoardings. The new scheme provides for on-the-spot fines for anyone caught in contravention of the provisions.
It is a laudable initiative (though some provisions – such as a bar on hanging laundry from a balcony – seemed unnecessarily puritan). If enforced, it could return much of the capital to its citizens, clearing the pavements, improving the traffic flow, and giving us a much cleaner city to enjoy.
We look forward to the implementation of the programme, confident that the impressions Mr Zampelas has brought back from Olympic Athens will spur him in his professed desire to transform Nicosia in a similar direction.
But transforming Nicosia does not only depend on its citizens observing the law, as we pointed out when this initiative was first announced. It also depends on the Municipal authorities and the government fulfilling their end of the bargain.
Indeed, we’d love to be able to walk unobstructed along the pavements, but we’d like to have decent pavements to do so. In July, we highlighted the appalling state of the pavement between the Pediaios bridge and the CyTA roundabout. Of course, nothing has been done about it since. Parked cars on the pavement force pedestrians into a fast and busy two-lane road, and even if the pavement were free, it’s shocking condition makes it dangerous to walk along without risking life and limb.
This is just one example. Anyone who tries to walk around Nicosia will highlight dozens of others. And then there’s the issue of public transport. Pavements and traffic are at the top of the Mayor’s priority but the root of the problem is the lack of public transport, which forces thousands of employees into their cars every day, when many would be glad to swap the traffic jams for a clean and efficient public transport system.
Time after time we are fed promises about transport studies and strategic plans. We have been hearing about the introduction of trams for years now. The first time we heard about it we got excited, thinking something was at last about to happen. Now we’ve just given up hope. Without addressing this basic problem, any other initiative, however welcome, is mere window dressing.
